The Evidence

As already mentioned, the sources for this study are personal documents – correspondence and diaries – rather than writings intended to influence public opinion. They are ‘personal’ because they reflect the individual responses of their authors, but ‘personal’ in this context does not necessarily mean ‘private’. Commenting on the way in which correspondence circulated among family or wider groupings in the eighteenth century, Clare Brant observes that:

During the period under consideration here, letter-writing was not only fashionable, but it also served as training for entry into the literary world; several correspondents wrote with the intention that their letters would be published.Footnote ¹² This observation is particularly relevant here, as some of the 44 individuals considered were also authors.

The tone and content of correspondence is affected by its recipients, even when a restricted readership was in view, as illustrated by Thomas Twining's letters. As we will see, his correspondence with Charles Burney, with whom he shared strong theoretical and historical musical interests, is generally restricted to matters of fact and opinion. His correspondence with his brother, Richard, says little about Thomas's personal reaction to music since the two individuals responded to it in very different ways, music apparently meaning little to Richard. It is only in letters to his university friends that he reveals more about the impact music had on him, as illustrated in the letter with which this article began.

Diaries, like letters, often had a wider readership than is immediately apparent. This had been so from earlier times, when sections of ‘spiritual diaries’ were customarily published after their authors’ deaths, but it was equally true in later times when, for example, governesses oversaw the writing of young women's diaries, and it was also the case in the period under discussion here.Footnote ¹³ And whether they were writing letters or diaries, high-profile individuals in this and other periods must have known that their personal documents would be read by family and friends, or published.

In addition to readership, genre also affected the style of documents. Diaries and journals – it matters little which term is usedFootnote ¹⁴ – in this period not infrequently take on the distinctive character of travel writing, especially those diaries that recount the adventures of their authors away from home. Expressions of wonder, awe, bafflement, amazement, and linguistic inadequacy caused by attempts to record the unfamiliar are common, but they often sit within a framework of resolutely factual reporting, according to the principles established by the Royal Society in 1660 and modelled by numerous later writers.Footnote ¹⁵ The emphasis is on the event or object observed, not on the author's emotional reaction to it. This sort of approach is typified in the travel writing of Charles Burney.Footnote ¹⁶

All of the factors mentioned above have an effect on what we learn about listening from personal documents. Not least, they help to explain a common phenomenon in these sources: the absence of personal reactions to what was heard. Only relatively rarely do we read expressions of emotion, no doubt because virtues such as self-control needed to be foregrounded for the benefit of other readers, or because a relationship with another individual required certain boundaries to be maintained.

Two examples highlight the differing styles in which personal documents from the period are written and some of the interpretive issues associated with them. Both are diaries, neither of which was published in the author's own lifetime, and both were written by characters whose listening we return to in greater detail in later sections of this article.

John Courtney (1734–1806) grew up in Beverley, Yorkshire. After studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, he returned to his home-town where, having inherited family property and wealth, he settled into a comfortable social life which occasionally took him to places such as York, Hull, Bath and London. The informal, sometimes note-form of Courtney's diary is exemplified in an otherwise fairly extensive (for him) entry for 17 September 1789, in which he included details of events he attended in Hull:

The style is simple and factual, although brief opinions are expressed from time to time (the extract above contains more than most in Courtney's diaries). This has to do with the probability that he was writing for himself: nowhere in the diary is there any hint that Courtney intended it to be read by anyone other than himself. Presumably, therefore, it served as a simple aide-mémoire of events he attended, people he met and music or performers that he heard. Courtney does not record his personal reaction to music, but his level of interest and involvement in what he heard can nevertheless be inferred from the extent of his evaluative comments, as we shall see. The style of this diary is in stark contrast to those of John Byng's.

John Byng (1742–1813) became fifth Viscount Torrington during the last weeks of his life. He was born into a naval family and became a page to George III before joining the army, in which he eventually rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the 1st Foot Guards. He left the army in 1780 to take up a position with the Inland Revenue at Somerset House. Few personal documents of Byng's survive beyond the journals in which he recorded his travels around England and Wales in the 1780s and 1790s. Unlike other travel diaries of the period these documents were not written for publication during the author's lifetime, but it is nevertheless clear that they were intended to be read by, or to, other people. Byng summarized his approach in an introduction to an account of his journey to the west of England in 1782:

This passage clearly shows that Byng's diaries were written for his wife and members of his household. The fact that people other than himself would have read them, or heard them read, almost certainly accounts for the polished and engaging style in which they are written. We may well imagine Byng revising drafts of their content while on his tours so that they could be used as family entertainment on his return. They are full of anecdote and opinion, with more than occasional glimpses of his personality. We will consider Courtney's and Byng's engagement with music below.

Listening in Society

Listeners in the period c. 1780–1830 often had multiple reasons for attending musical performances. Just as today, the pleasure of the occasion derived as much from seeing friends as from the performance itself; the two were not necessarily mutually exclusive. As William Weber has pointed out, we deceive ourselves if we think that modern audiences, or we ourselves, attend concerts with highly focused thoughts on the music alone: ‘Let us be honest about our own musical lives, remembering how much we ourselves gossip when we go, ritual-like, to our accustomed musical places.’Footnote ¹⁹ Commenting on points made in Christopher Small's Musicking, Stephanie Pitts observes of contemporary audience members that ‘even individuals who attend [concerts] alone do so in relation to the larger social group’, noting ‘that conversation and refreshment are an important part of the social interactions surrounding live music listening, and that feeling at home in the performance venue contributes to the pleasure of concert attendance’.Footnote ²⁰ But there is an essential difference between present-day behaviour and the way in which late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century audiences conducted themselves. Nowadays, at least during performances of most ‘classical’ concerts (though not necessarily at other sorts of concerts), conversation and other manifestations of audience noise are put to one side as far as possible once the music starts. This was simply not the case in earlier times, as many listening accounts show.

As is well-known, social visits and other activities occurred during performances, such as those reported by Sarah Spencer (1787–1870), daughter of the second Earl Spencer, in a letter to her brother of 4 June 1808:

The presence of high-ranking members of society proved to be particularly absorbing for many. Charles Wollaston (1765–1840), judge, composer and translator, some of whose correspondence was published posthumously along with other papers belonging to his half-sister Mary Frampton (1773–to 1846), wrote to the latter on 12 June 1814, following a visit to the opera five days previously:

The journal entry of 8 October 1818 by the poet, singer and songwriter Thomas Moore (1779–1852) is one of three in which men are singled out as the noisy members of the audience: ‘In the evening the Phippses, Macdonald, his wife's sister and mother, to tea and supper; played and sung for them; dull audience; no sounding boards; the men, too, would rather talk than listen.’Footnote ²³

So used were they to noisy British audiences that listeners were surprised when they encountered different traditions in other countries. When Colonel Peter Hawker (1786–1853) attended a concert in The Hague on 28 April 1821 he noted that ‘people were very well-behaved during the performance, no whistling or blackguard cries from the gallery like England, but all quiet and attentive like Paris’.Footnote ²⁴ His observation that Parisian audiences were quiet by this time accords with some of the findings in studies of listening environments in the French capital.Footnote ²⁵

Individuals among the 44 studied here reacted in different ways to the general noise and commotion that characterized performances in this period. For some, the extra-musical elements enhanced their evenings out. The author Mary Berry (1763–1852), who came from a wealthy merchant background, is one of several who seem to have attended performances at least as much for their social aspects as for the music. This assessment is never stated explicitly in her diaries, which span the period 1783–1852, but it can almost certainly be inferred by the relative balance of her comments on the music she heard, the contexts in which she heard it, and the audience. When an individual such as she habitually expended great efforts to describe the physical or social setting of performances but devoted comparatively little space to describing the impression made by the performance we might reasonably conclude that the social occasion was at least as important as the music, if not more so.

For the period under discussion Mary Berry's diaries contain well over 100 recorded experiences of listening to music in both Britain and Europe. She clearly had sufficient knowledge of music to evaluate performances, at least in a general way. One singer, for example, is described as singing with ‘wonderful expression and taste’Footnote ²⁶ while an opera buffa is described as ‘some of the prettiest music of the kind I ever heard’.Footnote ²⁷ (Her taste did not wholly extend to the music of Mozart's Figaro, however, which she describes as ‘delicious’ before adding that ‘I do not like music which from time to time mars the wit of Beaumarchais’).Footnote ²⁸ But nowhere in her journal or letters does she reveal herself as having been intensely affected by music, or deeply absorbed by it, including even the performances at Nelson's funeral on 13 January 1806, which was clearly a highly charged occasion and of which her journal contains a detailed description. The following journal entry dated 18 May 1810 records her attendance at a concert in the Hanover Square rooms and is typical of her reporting:

The description of the music is minimal, comments on the audience occupying the majority of the text, and the impression given is that the social occasion was at least as important to her as the music.

While there were several commentators like Mary Berry among the sample of 44, there were others who were perplexed that audience attention was so easily drawn away from music. Lady Charlotte Susan Maria Campbell Bury (1775–1861), author and lady-in-waiting to the royal household, acknowledged that those who wanted to be able to concentrate on the music were a minority when she reported on a concert in June 1819:

Those who wanted to pay attention to music found ways of doing so despite being surrounded by distractions. The society hostess and daughter of the fifth Duke of Devonshire Henrietta Leveson Gower (1785–1862) positioned herself carefully in her box, as she related in a letter to her sister written on 20 November 1824:

It was not just the behaviour of the audience to which some listeners objected, but also the populist trend in concert programming. In the late eighteenth century the format of concerts was largely predictable: Simon McVeigh describes the ‘standardised two-part programme-format of some ten to twelve items, alternating instrumental and vocal items’ as the norm.Footnote ³² But as time went on and West End concerts in particular catered increasingly for a popular market, this programme structure was adapted and a greater emphasis on vocal items emerged in some concerts, while instrumental works were increasingly based on popular airs and the like.Footnote ³³ Some listeners objected. The poet and rector's daughter Anna Seward (1742–1809) as well as Thomas Twining, both listeners to whom further consideration is given later in this article, were particularly disdainful of this populist trend. On five occasions in her correspondence Anna Seward expressed disapproval of those audience members whom she considered inattentive at the same time as lamenting programming that she clearly considered to be lightweight. For example, in a letter to Mrs Cotton dated 27 October 1785 she observed that:

Thomas Twining went a step further, collecting together a small audience of like-minded listeners to hear some ‘quality’ music. Writing to his brother on 29 November 1796 he described a concert he had given with a pianist, Mrs Baker, commenting that ‘I invited no unmusical, or half musical hearers, & we enjoyed the music we liked without the necessity of playing worse music to please popular & Ignorant hearers’.Footnote ³⁵

The account of Twining's select concert suggests that those who sought opportunities to listen attentively, away from the noise and commotion of public concerts, found greater satisfaction in small, private venues rather than in public auditoriums. A larger body of evidence would throw further light on the public/private aspects of listening in this period, as acknowledged in another study of the subject,Footnote ³⁶ but at least some of the evidence considered here suggests that those who had a keen interest in music valued a more intimate setting than public performances afforded. Thomas Twining's experience with which this article began was certainly one of those, as he soaked up not just the music, but the intimate atmosphere (‘snug & comfortable’). He enjoyed a similarly intimate performance by Pacchierotti which took place at the home of Charles Burney ‘in a snug way’.Footnote ³⁷

Listeners’ Varying Experiences

The previous section distinguished listeners who enjoyed the busy social atmosphere of performances from those who liked to concentrate more intensely on the music, but while that simple distinction may hold good for a proportion of the listening public it does not characterize all of them adequately. The evidence of some individuals presents a more complex picture. Both John Courtney and John Byng, considered earlier, show how the same person reacted to music differently, depending on the occasion.

Like the accounts in Mary Berry's diary, John Courtney's mostly brief descriptions of musical performances in his home town generally contain more information about the social context of his listening than about the music. The following diary entry for 24 February 1790 is typical: ‘I & my wife & my Son Thomas were at Mr Lambert's Concert. There was more Company than I ever saw at a Concert in Beverley’.Footnote ³⁸ The impression given here, and on numerous other occasions, is that he was at least as interested in the social context of the evening as he was in the music. But what is intriguing about Courtney's listening is that he appears to have been much more attentive to music when he attended performances away from home. His diary entries for Hull, London, and other places where he heard music away from the routine of local performances include a greater degree of detailed comment and musical evaluation. An example is the report of his visit to a concert in Hull on 17 September 1789, quoted earlier: ‘the singing & instrumental music exceeded far that of yesterday. The Songs by Harrison, Mrs Billington, & Miss Cantelo, were delightfully fine indeed, but Sale & Pearson I thought but very indifferent.’Footnote ³⁹ Courtney's comments are never extensive, but these show how his careful listening and attention to the music enabled him to evaluate and compare the singers, as well as the overall quality of the performance, with what he had heard on the previous day.

Why is there a discrepancy between the nature of Courtney's descriptions of music in his home town and in other places? It seems likely that the differences relate to two factors. The first concerns the nature of performances in his home town, where he attended events within the close community of which he was part. These events served many purposes: they were occasions on which partners for his children were assessed and other social transactions were made. His diary entries suggest that Courtney's attention to the nuances of local society behaviour outweighed the attention he gave to the music, whereas similar social distractions were unlikely to have been so prevalent when he travelled away from home. The second factor relates to the quality of performances. Since those in Beverley were given largely by local performers it is unlikely that they were of a high standard, and the evidence of Courtney's diaries suggests that the repertoire was limited. But on his travels he heard the country's best professional musicians performing music that would not have been heard in Beverley: there was every reason for him to listen attentively and make detailed notes. Courtney was certainly capable of listening carefully and chose to do so on some occasions, but on other occasions he seems to have been more preoccupied with social matters: the nature of his listening seems to have depended on the context of the performance.

John Byng's diaries provide over 50 listening experiences, and the general impression gained from them is that he was a respectful but not very engaged listener, at least when he was listening to the kind of music that was regularly on offer in public or private concerts: when he listened to Welsh harpists he listened intently, as we will see.

Byng's apparent lack of interest in what we might term ‘concert music’ contrasts strikingly with his engagement with other aspects of culture. From his diaries we learn that he was widely read, familiar with writers such as Fielding, Richardson and Sterne, but particularly interested in ‘history and anecdotes; a well written tour; a surprising voyage or a description of ancient customs, and manners. These are the books for my money’.Footnote ⁴⁰ He was also interested in old and new architecture and fond of drawing. Byng was no cultural Philistine.

However, Byng's diary describes his aversion to listening at length to ‘concert music’. He professed to prefer a simple tune. Recording a visit to Cheltenham in June 1781 he observed:

And in July of the same year he wrote of a performance in Oxford:

The evidence is clear that Byng found ‘concert music’ tiresome, but his reaction to other types of music was very different. On several occasions during his travels he reports how he sought out Welsh harpists as he lodged at various town and village inns. For example, at Llangollen on 26 July 1793, having enquired earlier in the day about the local harpists he dined and subsequently fell asleep, but was ‘agreeably awaken'd roused by the harper rattling away, at the bottom of the stairs’. The performance prompted the following reflection:

Fascination with Welsh harpists was embedded in parts of London's society in the eighteenth century, no doubt validated by the appointment of a harper to the Prince of Wales in 1736. Byng's obsession with harpists is first expressed in the account of his visit to Wales in the summer of 1784, the same year in which Edward Jones’ Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards was published, which perhaps sparked his interest. Whatever the origins of Byng's enthusiasm, he formed strong views about the way that Welsh harpists should play. He preferred simplicity over artifice. On hearing the blind harpist Edward Jones (not the Edward Jones mentioned above) in Corwen on 27 July 1793 he wrote: ‘These harpers will introduce variations, and spoil their tunes; which should be play'd simply, and manfully’,Footnote ⁴⁴ a view consistent with his stated preference for ‘an ordinary tune to relieve my vulgar ears, which soon get tired of difficult lessons, and hard concertos’ (see above). Byng, then, was no lover of ‘artifice’ in music and endeavoured to avoid too much of it, preferring a wholly different repertoire which he sought out and to which he listened carefully and critically.

Absorbed Listening

Only a minority of the listeners considered so far have been described as highly absorbed in, or strongly affected by, musical performances. Of the 44 individuals considered for this study only a dozen or so explicitly describe these sorts of responses and a number of them record just a few instances. Those that exist are distributed roughly equally between male and female authors.

Of all the sources studied it is the 60 or so listening accounts written by Anna Seward to a wide variety of men and women in the years 1784 to 1807 that include the highest density of accounts of intense engagement with music. Anna Seward seems to have had an innate propensity for responding to music and an ability to express her feelings vividly. Archibald Constable, who prepared her letters for publication in a series of six volumes in 1811, two years after her death, noted that ‘it is to be feared, that even in these familiar epistles, several affectations of style, arising mostly from too free an use of poetic imagery, may tend somewhat to obscure their real merit’. Of her character he observed that she had ‘an independent and vigorous mind, entering with animation into every subject which is presented to it’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Anna Seward does not seem to have been encouraged to respond strongly to music as a child. She was not from a musical family and it is unlikely that she engaged in music-making at an early age. Although her grandfather was a ‘tolerable’ player on the bass viol none of her mother and two aunts ‘could, in the least degree, distinguish one tune from another’.Footnote ⁴⁶ She herself had little or no musical tuition until she was in her twenties, so in contrast to many of her peers she was an adult learner, as she explains:

The strength of Anna's response to music can be judged by the following description written to Mrs Hayley in 1795 of the effects produced on her by hearing Handel's music:

In addition to describing her reactions to particular performances Anna Seward sometimes comments on broader listening topics. One of those is music's ability to invoke powerful responses to the past. This is a well-recognized theme in the modern literature of listening. For instance, in one study of contemporary listening, Sloboda, O'Neill and Ivaldi remark that ‘the use of music as a cue to reminiscence (nostalgia) is the single most frequent use reported’ and in her book Music in Everyday Life Tia DeNora devotes several pages to a discussion of music and memory.Footnote ⁴⁹ The letter with which this article began refers to Thomas Twining's reaction on hearing music that was little performed at the time, but which reminded him of ‘departed friends’, and other sources quoted in this article discuss the same phenomenon. However, none of the listeners studied here are as explicit on the theme of music and reminiscence as Anna Seward, one of whose letters contains the following remarks:

Anna Seward corresponded with a large number of people, evidently assuming that many of them would be interested in her personal reactions to music: her detailed descriptions of these reactions are evenly spread throughout her correspondence. In contrast, Thomas Twining only occasionally commented on the way in which music affected him (see the beginning of this article for an example). His letters were written predominantly to a small circle of male recipients, including Charles Burney with whom Twining loved to correspond about theoretical and historical matters and to whom he sent several of the 40 or so letters in which Twining discusses his listening. These letters rarely include remarks about Twining's feelings about the music he heard: their tone probably reflects Burney's primary interests in the subject and Twining's eagerness to engage with him intellectually.

Another of Twining's regular correspondents was his half-brother Richard. Again, while there are a few places in which Thomas reveals his personal reactions to what he heard, the listening accounts in these letters are generally of a factual nature. This is probably accounted for by the fundamentally different ways in which the half-brothers experienced music, as outlined in a letter from Thomas to Richard dated 24 September 1797:

Between them, Charles Burney and Richard Twining received more than half of the letters in which Thomas Twining related his listening experiences. No wonder, then, that we have only a few detailed accounts of his own reactions to music, though there can be no doubt that he experienced it deeply. Twining is a good example of a letter writer whose descriptions of listening are dependent to a significant extent on the interests and character of the recipient.

From the correspondence of Anna Seward and Thomas Twining it is clear that both continued to be affected by music throughout their lives, but we should not assume that all those listeners who enjoyed intense experiences of listening at some time or other did so consistently. Although this does not seem to have applied to Anna Seward, she commented in a letter to Sophia Weston on 17 April 1787 that:

The prolific opera commentator Richard Edgcumbe, the second Earl of Mount Edgcumbe (1764–1839), seems to have experienced just this sort of blunting of his sensibility to music. Late in life, in 1828, he wrote a lengthy critique of the singer Catalani commenting of her performance that it ‘excited feelings with which music had long ceased to inspire me’.Footnote ⁵³

As Anna Seward suggests, intense listening was sometimes prompted by an encounter with novelty, or with something exceptional or unfamiliar that grabbed the listener's attention. This is unsurprising since accounts of these sorts of listening experiences occur from time to time across all types of listeners from all historical periods. Among the sample studied here it is striking to read several accounts of listening to the 1738 organ by Müller in St Bavo's church in Haarlem, which always seems to have elicited an intense reaction. Because the organ building traditions of Great Britain and northern Europe were so different, British listeners would have heard nothing as grand and imposing as this organ, which remains one of the most famous in the world. All of the listeners who mention it were astonished at its effect. Peter Hawker's account of his experience in 1821 is typical:

Tears

Sometimes, intense listening experiences resulted in tears. This article began with an example described by Thomas Twining in a letter to his friend and university tutor John Hey. We now return to it in order to examine its detail and its broader social context. The letter describes how he cried in front of another university friend, Henry Elmsall:

According to the extract there were two factors in Twining's description that made the performance conducive to tears. The first was the occasion itself. As discussed above, this was a private listening experience in a ‘snug & comfortable environment’ in which Twining was surrounded by like-minded musicians. There were no distractions. The second factor was the repertoire. These were older works, the likes of which were rarely performed in public at the time. Encountering music of this sort was a particular treat, perhaps similar to the singing of childhood songs described by Anna Seward.

But the circumstances of this performance were not the only factors that encouraged his crying. In the broader cultural context of the 1780s tears were an accepted, if not entirely uncontroversial element of social life. So how frequently did listeners cry in response to music during the period c. 1780–1830? Of the 44 listeners studied for this article four (including Twining) mention tearful reactions to musical performances. Some mention crying on more than one occasion. In an account of listening from 1791, William Gardiner (1770–1853) reported that tears were shed at performances of the singer Pacchierotti – they were the orchestra's tears, rather than Gardiner's:

Thomas Moore's journals and letters contain several references to crying in response to music. In a letter written on 7 November 1803 to his mother he noted that one Miss Matthews had played some of Moore's sisters ‘lessons, which brought the tears into my eyes with recollection’Footnote ⁵⁷ (a further example of a powerful response to reminiscence, probably intensified on this occasion by hearing familiar music on foreign soil in Norfolk, Virginia). Moore also mentions several other instances of crying (in the years 1818 to 1822), both the tears of individuals and the tears of groups of listeners containing both men and women.Footnote ⁵⁸ On two occasions (in 1790 and 1806) Anna Seward records tears being shed in reaction to performances, but rather than emphasizing her own personal experience, she comments on the simultaneous crying of a group of people of which she was part.Footnote ⁵⁹

Tearful reactions should not surprise us, considering the well-documented effects of the culture of sensibility that was evident during the period, for example, in the novels of Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne.Footnote ⁶⁰ But male crying remained controversial. A significant strand of recent research on manliness and masculinity examines contemporary conduct literature, personal correspondence and diaries in order to assess the real extent to which male sensibility was exhibited in society at the end of the eighteenth and in the early decades of the nineteenth centuries. It reveals a complex picture of male behaviour which varied to some extent according to factors such as social class, location (urban or provincial) and family background.Footnote ⁶¹ Of course, changes in behaviours also took place over time and we should not assume, for example, that all men brought up in the second half of the eighteenth century read the most recent conduct literature, or received the latest advice and guidance from their families or their university mentors.Footnote ⁶² Instead, the discussion about manliness and sensibility in the period c. 1780–1830 is nuanced. Philip Carter explores the relationship between the two, pointing out that to speak of their co-existence:

The effeminacy referred to here was widely criticized and characterized by overly sensitive behaviour. Perhaps its most extreme expression was in foppish behaviour, which along with heightened sensitivity included flamboyant dressing, extravagant wigs and a preference for female company.Footnote ⁶⁴ Twining was therefore treading on controversial ground when he described his reaction to music and although there is no doubt that he cried, his description is measured. There were no other physical gestures or verbal expressions, and there was no immediate flood of tears. The account begins cautiously with ‘great dispositions to cry’. The tears then ‘actually came out’, the phrase suggesting that the tears were a little reluctant to emerge. Twining's description of his tears may have been fairly circumspect, but his friend Elmsall evidently held a different view from Twining's on the subject of crying: he just thought that Twining looked ‘foolish’.

Philip Clarke's chapter ‘Tears and the Man’ begins by examining a conversation between Edmund Burke and Sir Philip Francis about Burke's description of his own tearful reaction to the ejection of Marie Antoinette from Versailles in October 1789. The discussion between the two men resulted in a letter from Burke to Francis, upon which Carter comments:

These comments are not entirely borne out by the listeners’ tears studied here, which occurred between 1780 and 1822, with a heavy concentration in the years 1818 to 1822 (both male and female tears are reported into the 1820s). But we will need a larger sample in order to assess the extent of crying as a reaction to music in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

The Language of Listening Accounts

The listeners considered so far ranged from those who tended to be more-or-less indifferent to music to those who were deeply affected by it. Sometimes more than one characteristic is evidenced in a single person. We know all this because the accounts themselves are either explicit about their authors’ reactions to music, or because the impact it had on them is evident from the extent to which music features in their descriptions of performances. A further indication of the extent of listeners’ engagement with music is the language they use to describe it. In summary, those who wrote about their intense listening experiences also tended to use a rich vocabulary to describe them while those who habitually listened to music more casually used a much more limited vocabulary.

The terms used by writers to describe their experiences provide clues to the intensity of their listening. Among those words used by virtually every individual studied here is ‘fine’, which is often used in generalized descriptions of listening such as Mary Berry's account of a performance in Hanover Square on 18 May 1810: ‘The Handel part of the concert fine.’Footnote ⁶⁶ Other adjectives that are used frequently and in a general way include ‘admirable’, ‘agreeable’, ‘charming’, ‘delightful’, ‘enchanting’, ‘pleasing’ and ‘pretty’. Of these words, the last is probably the most interesting. Whereas in modern usage it typically means little more than ‘superficially pleasing’, in the period c. 1780–1830 it sometimes took on more of its traditional meaning of ‘clever’ or ‘skilful’, as in the following account of Thomas Moore's: ‘Mad. De Broglie sang with me, “Go where Glory waits Thee”, and pronounced the words (all except “hearth”, which she made rather a startling sound of) very prettily.’Footnote ⁶⁷ Nevertheless, ‘pretty’ is usually used in much the same way as ‘fine’ to provide a generally favourable, but non-specific assessment of a performance. Like the other words mentioned, it is particularly prevalent in the writings of those for whom listening was rarely, if ever, a very intense affair.

Listeners who wrote about their intense reactions to music tended to use a much more varied vocabulary. There is no better example than Anna Seward who, being a poet, understandably uses a rich language palette, although others with no particular claims to literary expertise wrote in similar ways. A small sample of Seward's prose from a report of a concert on 27 October 1790 illustrates this point: ‘I ventured to one of the morning music festivals at Shrewsbury, and heard Mr Saville open the Messiah with a pathos, an energy, and a grace that none ever excelled, and which I never heard equalled.’Footnote ⁶⁸ This sort of language provides a much more vivid account than Mary Berry's brief ‘The Handel part of the concert fine’, quoted above. Whereas Mary Berry's simple ‘fine’ served to discuss a whole Handel performance, Anna Seward used ‘pathos’, ‘energy’ and ‘grace’ to describe a small section. The use of multiple words such as these is by no means confined to Anna Seward's accounts. For example, in the same letter as Thomas Twining describes his tears he also refers to Pacchierotti's singing as having ‘taste, spontaneous variation, delicacy, & expression’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Accounts with rich descriptions such as these are absent from the writing of Mary Berry and others of the 44 writers considered here who show little evidence of being strongly affected by music. The richer linguistic palette of Seward and Twining provides an altogether more detailed impression of what they heard, reflecting their close attention to music.

Two words in particular seem to serve as something of a barometer of intensity among the sources studied; ‘sublime’ and ‘sensibility’. These words are rarely used by the likes of Mary Berry (who never used them herself to describe music), but they are frequently found in sources in which the powerful effects of music are described. Charles Greville (1794–1865) is one such example. In a diary entry written on 20 November 1829 he announces himself as an intense listener by describing a performance of a song by Thomas Moore which ‘produces an exceeding sadness, and brings to mind a thousand melancholy recollections, and generates many melancholy anticipations’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Later journal entries of his describe music as ‘sublime’, especially the experience of listening to the choir in the Sistine Chapel and in St Peter's, Rome, both of which he described in this way in April 1830. No doubt other aspects of the occasion contributed to the overall effect – ritual, candles, stained glass, architecture, and so on.

The word ‘sensibility’ is used less often than ‘sublime’ in this study's sources. Rather than describing a performance it is often used to characterize the qualities of a singer, always within a context of appreciation by a writer. So at the end of the letter quoted at the beginning of this article Twining says of Pacchierotti that ‘he seems to have a great deal of sense, sensibility, taste, & modesty’.Footnote ⁷¹ Performers with ‘sensibility’ were able to touch the feelings of listeners by the way that they sang or played.

‘Sublime’ and ‘sensibility’ are interesting terms because they have such strong aesthetic and cultural connotations. Both feature significantly in the aesthetic writings of the eighteenth century and we have already seen how the culture of sensibility found its expression in some listeners’ reactions to music. But how much knowledge did these listeners have of the literature in which the concepts were discussed, and to what extent were the terms used simply because they were in general use? These are issues that deserve a much more thorough investigation than can be included here, but among the listeners studied for this article there is at least one who was familiar enough with the literature on aesthetics to have a clearly defined knowledge of the terms.

Thomas Twining not only knew the works of philosophers (in the letter that opens this article he refers to Descartes), but he wrote on aesthetics himself. His translation of Aristotle's treatise on poetry was published alongside two ‘dissertations’ in which he explained Aristotle's thinking and applied it to a contemporary understanding of music. The essential notion with which he grapples is the nature of musical imitation, concluding that ‘music can be said to imitate no further than as it expresses something’.Footnote ⁷² The connection between music and expression is emphasized further in statements such as ‘the highest power of music and that from which “it derives its greatest efficacy”, is undoubtedly its power of raising emotions’.Footnote ⁷³ For Twining, music and emotion were inextricably linked, and when he used terms such as ‘sensibility’ and ‘sublime’ we can be fairly certain that he understood their specific aesthetic meanings. To what extent the same was true of other writers remains a subject for future study, but what is established here is that listeners tended to use vocabulary in distinctive ways according to the intensity of their listening.